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​​​​​​​IMAGINING ASIA - A symposium consisting of lectures, panels, workshops, and readings to be held on 16-18 January 2015 at NTU under the auspices of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, and in collaboration with the University of Leeds – invites further and new investigations as to how we might set about understanding the overwhelmingly complex idea and material reality that is Asia. ​

​The Symposium took as its presiding metaphor the Silk Road. When, as part of its Five-Year Strategic Blueprint, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, announced in 2010 a list of Five Peaks of Excellence, one of these was entitled 'The New Silk Road'. Within the wider remit of the institution, the New Silk Road as a Peak of Research Excellence is posited ‘a natural route of progression for NTU. Its Chinese heritage and international standing as a global university make it a unique knowledge hub that combines the best of the East and the West’. As to be expected, behind NTU’s conceptualisation lies the ongoing significance of the historical Silk Road. The name, an invention of the nineteenth-century German explorer, Baron Ferdinand von Richtofen, the Silk Road was a scrawl of routes and trails which linked East Asia and the Pacific with Europe and the Mediter​ranean. For long before and after the second century B.C., it was a contact zone of travellers, merchants, and indigenous peoples; of wars, conquests, and trade; and of cultural borrowings, adaptations, and interchanges. An extraordinarily rich palimpsest of histories, cultures, and cultural interrelations, it continues to speak to us across the long passage of time in potent and instructive ways of our own world and our century.​

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